Vision and Revision

Published poets and writers know that revision is the heart of writing; but many of us still dread the process.  

I used to agonize over revising poems. I couldn’t pry my poems open; they resisted me. But as I spent more time working on poems with my poet-peers – in community workshops and eventually in an MFA program – I realized I simply hadn’t had the tools I needed, I hadn’t understood the questions I needed to ask.

I still struggle, but I don’t feel the dread I used to feel as I approached a draft of a poem. Now I ask the poem big questions about its theme, for example: What’s at stake in the poem?  Am I touching lightly on a difficult topic that I need to probe more deeply?

I also ask the “smaller” questions, the ones that may actually address the big issues: Can the music of the poem lead me to a more complicated reckoning? Are the verbs interesting and vigorous? What experience is the poem’s shape giving the reader? Do I want to slow the eye down or move it along? Might the poem include dialogue? 

Once I started employing these questions, I realized that revision is not just about line breaks and word choice and commas; it’s about uncovering the poem’s essence.

These are just a few of the approaches we’ll be using to help us awaken our poems, in the upcoming Writers in Progress weekly workshop, Vision & Revision: The Art of Revising Poems.  We’ll be meeting on Zoom for five weeks beginning October 23, asking a lot of questions of each other and of our poems. We’ll experiment. We’ll get goofy. We’ll take our poems seriously. Hope you’ll join us!